A Man Entangled in a Net of Lies and Vices

There are various ways of honouring one's parents. Raimondo di Sangro, the seventh Prince of Sansevero, a Neapolitan, commissioned a sculptural portrait of his father disentangling himself from the nets, or snares, of deceit and sin, accompanied by an angelic figure who frees the sinner for the bosom of the Church, and by biblical quotations: "And now I will break his yoke from off thee, and burst thy bonds", "For when lawless men supposed that they held the holy nation in their power, they themselves, prisoners of darkness and captives of a long night, shut up in their houses, lay exiled from eternal providence."

The most curious thing is that the Sansevero captured in the sculpture became a priest at the end of his life, and his sin consisted in drinking, carousing and living with young women after he was widowed. The sculpture itself is of marble, but the net is the finest work in pumice. The statue of the entangled man is one of the masterpieces gathered in the family chapel of the princes of Sansevero in Naples, built on Masonic principles in honour of the image of the Virgin Mary.